So I wrote an essay...

Separate Realities
-by Cody C. Campbell
6/1/14

I was an eighth grade student in a highschool. I was as extrinsic as a peacock in a henhouse, and happier than I had ever been in the entirety of my time in any school before. It was the year of our lord 2012 that my world, ironically, ended; though not in the whole “wrath of the gods, fire from heaven” sort of way the Mayans pictured it. I know that sounds a tad bit dramatic, but the “end of times” didn’t happen all at once. There was no epiphany or life-changing moment of clarity, only gradual realization. You see, Shelby County schools are a little odd in that they send eighth graders to highschool rather than middle school, which was a truly wonderful decision for which I am, and always will be, grateful in the extreme, mostly because it removed me from the hormonal cesspool that was middleschool, a wonderful place where I was subjected to all manner of pleasantries including (but not limited to) bullying, infighting, melodrama, and the ever-present odor of sweat. Oh, and let us not forget the always-fun showboating of under-developed muscles or a riveting game of who-can-curse-the-most! That was fun. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel like that was the environment for me, so you can imagine my excitement when I was told that I would be going to highschool rather than having to endure yet another year of…that other place. I took to this new world very well, thriving and gaining recognition for the amazing individual that I am, and, long story short: becoming the academic success I am today.
The point of this story is not to comment upon the evils of humanity, or even middleschool in particular (though it is obvious that the place IS most assuredly a demon nesting ground), and this story certainly isn’t to tell you of my no-doubt thrilling journey of self-discovery; I’m simply not the kind of guy to open up and “share my feelings”. The point of this story is that reality itself changed for me that year, not objectively, but subjectively. Subjective reality: refers to the reality of the mind; the meaning you assign to things and events. Going alongside this definition, one can surmise that what I mean is that the way I view my world has changed. I progressed from an under-confident defeatist mindset, one that honestly placed dirt higher on the scale of value than itself, to a borderline narcissistic attitude which fully believed in its own superiority. I suppose you might say my values may have changed a little bit.
After escaping Satan’s Jacuzzi, I went through quite a lot of introspection, “what is life” type stuff, and I realized that if the way we see the world can be changed so easily, with the right “encouragement” in different places, especially considering the groundbreaking work of people like, say, Steve Ramirez and his team at M.I.T., implanting false memories into the mind of another creature, how real is the objective reality? We have absolutely no proof (and this might just be me watching too much sci-fi) to the contrary that this world is not as artificial as something like the matrix, or Limbo from Inception. One thought slammed into place after another in my brain, like legos in some grand design. Things built, one upon the other: eighth grade, highschool, middleschool, bullying, science, the world, fake, fake, fake! I had begun to obsess over these questions in every spare moment; it was like that feeling you get just after finishing a book or movie, and the world doesn’t quite seem to be all there. If I didn’t even know whether or not the world around me, tractor tires, comic books, or even I myself exist, how does one determine the value of, well…anything? I certainly didn’t feel particularly valuable when I was being ignored by my peers in the tail-water of humanity, but the very next year I could have been made from diamonds for all the attention I received. I was even glorified for my odd mannerisms, bad jokes, and constant hand-motions when I talk, the same reasons I was once made fun of last year! So was my consciousness just some meaningless blob of whatever-the-heck-it-is floating around in space? Assuming space even existed.
Naturally that was quite a bit of thinking for a teenager, whose immature mind typically revolved around more important things such as whether or not the Joker could beat Carnage in a fight, even now I can tell that I’m pressing my pen into the paper hard enough for this assignment to be considered brail (or, I could. This is the typed copy). So it took awhile before I had a thought: the famous words of Rene Descartes, or however it is you say it, “I think, therefore, I am.” I’m sure you’ve never heard that phrase before. So I took those words to heart; after all, belief in my own existence is about as certain of anything as I can be at this point.
Having decided upon this foundation, and accepted it as fact, I can assume that the only thing of any real worth or value in the whole of existence, is the only thing that I know to be real: myself, and by natural extension, that which I believe to be true. In the end my beliefs are the only ones that matter because everyone else might not even exist, and whether or not they do doesn’t matter. The world is my sandbox, and it is completely subject to my interpretation of reality. Deep stuff for a teenager.
Saying all of this might sound like some self-glorifying speech about how I will always be better than everyone, and it is, technically speaking, but it’s also about how every person is the center of their own reality, and theirs are the only ones that matter to them. When I say the world ended, it means that my interpretation of the universe suffered a cataclysmic shift in values and opinions, and once I realized that nothing was set in stone, I grasped the importance of subjectivity. In the words of Shakespeare “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”